


Weights and Measures

by darkstar1013



Category: The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (2015)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Mission Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-14
Updated: 2019-03-14
Packaged: 2019-11-17 20:13:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18105662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkstar1013/pseuds/darkstar1013
Summary: Ilya, Gaby, and Solo know their job is to maintain balance. Their job is to bear the weight, no matter what needs to be done or who you have to give up. Only this time, Ilya isn’t sure if he can do that, not with Gaby, and he’s running out of time to find another way.





	Weights and Measures

**Author's Note:**

  * For [insomniabug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/insomniabug/gifts).
  * Inspired by [the weight of us](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7569043) by [insomniabug](https://archiveofourown.org/users/insomniabug/pseuds/insomniabug). 



Weights and Measures  
by Darkstar1013

Ilya, Gaby, and Solo know their job is to maintain balance. Their job is to bear the weight, no matter what needs to be done or who you have to give up. Only this time, Ilya isn’t sure if he can do that, not with Gaby, and he’s running out of time to find another way.

A response to The Weight of Us by Insomniabug.

**

Ilya sits on the edge of the uncomfortable couch, watching the hotel room door. 

A knife-edge of light cuts across the dark room from the open bathroom door. The tub of hot water he drew for her return is tepid and useless. He has given up playing chess. He has given up his book, though he's read Chekov so many times he can recite the words, and he does, moving his lips without sound.

/A country house on a terrace. In front of it, a garden. In an avenue of trees, under an old poplar, stands a table for tea, with a samovar.../

Solo would only tell him two things: she was alive and Ilya could not be there when they picked her up. When he called Waverly, the same two things were repeated with the sincerest, politest British apologies. After that, no one told him anything because he broke the phone. Solo left him the briefing as a condolence, but it gave him nothing useful. She was alive. She was at a CIA safe house, requesting immediate assistance with the processing of a prisoner for questioning with crucial information about the mission that had stalled for weeks. She'd done her job. Of course.

Never mind the three days they'd spent scouring France, or the dozens of agents looking for her, Agent Gabrielle Teller would waltz right out of trouble when she damn well felt like it, and she'd bring “crucial information” with her. His stomach had warmed with pride-- had he expected anything else-- then twisted again because yes, he had expected something else. He had an inexhaustible catalog of things to expect, but that thought made his hands shake and he'd set the report aside to draw her a bath because he didn't want her to come home to a trashed hotel room. Ilya knew the safe house-- he'd memorized all of them, as always, before the mission-- and it was not even an hour's drive away. Forty-five minutes with Gaby's driving.

One hour. Two hours. Two and a half hours.

The bath is cold and he is watching the door and he is trying very, very hard not to think about anything else but Chekov.

/Some benches and chairs stand near the table. On one of them is lying a guitar. A hammock is swung near the table. It is three o'clock in the afternoon of a cloudy day./

Perhaps Solo went to the wrong safe house.  
Perhaps he was going to break the Cowboy's jaw.

/A country house on a terrace. In front of it, a garden.../

The doorknob clicks.

Ilya has prepared himself for this moment: he will rise, he will look at her and he will not flinch; he will nod once, to acknowledge her bravery, like he would at any other agent, and then he will pour her a drink. Professional. Polite. 

/In an avenue of trees.../

A blur of purple brocade and blood. Her hair wet against her forehead, the expensive silver pumps he picked out for her dangling from her wrist. He barely even sees Solo slip back out the door to give them the moment alone.

/Under an old poplar under and old poplar under an old poplar/

Ilya doesn't realize he has moved until he is on his knees in front of her, his forehead against her abdomen. The heat of her through the thin brocade. The trembling-- hers or his, he isn't sure. Her hands, soft, against his temples, against the still-angry bruise from the crowbar that caught him off guard, the weakness that could have cost him everything and--

Her hands, soft against his temple.  
His hands against her hips, pulling her closer.   
The heat of her.

She drops her hands, and he feels her gaze move beyond him into the darkened room, and it occurs to him how foolish he must look, how weak, clutching her like a child holding a blanket. He stands, too quickly, takes a step toward to the table beside the couch, switching on the light. A sullen yellow glow rises through the room like a headache. She ignores him and walks straight to the liquor cabinet, dropping her high heels behind her. He notes the hitch in her step, the stagger and sway; she needs sleep, hours of it, but if he tells her that she'll probably stay up all night just to spite him.

Clink of glass, shine of lamp light on vodka. Something acrid in the air.

Her back to him, shoulders bunched, every muscle a knot. Whatever she was holding in is going to tear through the room like a gasoline explosion once she let it out. He watches her drink one glass, then two, and when she pours the third, he coughes.

“Don't” She throws the word over her shoulder. “I've earned it.”  
“How did you do it?”  
“What?”  
“How you escape?”  
The glass in her hand freezes halfway up to her mouth. She sets it back on the bar top. “You have the report.”  
“The report did not say.”  
“Vinceguerra’s idiots got tired of asking me questions I would not answer.”  
“They let you go?”  
“They put me in a trunk and a man with an ugly sweater drove me out to a potato field to shoot me in the head. But he was distracted.” She downs the glass in one swift gulp, and does he see her shudder? “So I got the gun. I put him in the trunk. You know the rest.”

They stand in silence, in that half-drunk yellow light, which hollows the bruises on the back of her neck of they are deeper and angrier than they'd be in daylight. At least he hopes it is just the light. It's what he blames.

“How is your head?” she asks, her voice small and weary.  
“Of no consequence.”   
“My head pounds.” She rests her empty glass against her forehead. Sweat and glass glimmer. She sets the glass down and reaches behind her for the zipper of her dress, but winces. Tries again. Winces again. Her hand moves down to her ribs and she grimaces.

“Ok, help me.” She still isn't looking at him. “But...don't break anything.”  
“Break your dress?” He doesn't understand.  
“Break the hotel room.” 

The zipper sticks, and he pulls, then pulls harder. She flinches when it gives way.   
Ilya is field-trained. He has held the intestines inside into a screaming gut-shot boy soldier. He has retrieved a foot, still in its boot. He's set naked bone. Once it was his own bone.  
He does not flinch. And all he can see really is the dark line of bruises snaking down her spine and blossoming elsewhere, like an algae bloom, covering places he can't see beneath the dress, bruises made worse by the lamplight. He assures himself she will be no worse than any other field agent in her position. A great deal better than most. There is very little visible blood. A few broken ribs. He knows this is a good outcome. But now that he is closer, he can see the bruises on her neck are fingerprints, a necklace of them. He covers one of the bruises with his thumb, very gently, as if it would rub off. The little finger of his left hand begins to tremble. 

A coutnry house on a terrace. In front of it is a garden...

“Do you need any other assistance?”   
“I think I've done a pretty good job of assisting myself.” She walks toward the bathroom. “Assist yourself out, comrade.” The dress slips down off her shoulders as she walks down the hall, and in the flash of too-bright light as she opens the bathroom door, he sees the whole story of the last three days illuminated on her back and shoulders, just a flash, like the end of a reel of movie film, then the door is close and she's swearing in German at whoever left cold water in the tub.

In an avenues of trees...

He breaks the lamp as he leaves the hotel room.

**

Cigarette smoke in the hallway outside the door. Solo's face impassive behind the blue-gray haze, staring resolutely at the one burned out lightbulb in the ceiling fixture. Ilya frowns. The American dislikes cigarettes, as a rule; the smell ruins his expensive clothes. But here he hasn't even bothered to remove so much as his tie.

“Care for a smoke, Peril?” Still charming. Always charming. Ilya wonders if it’s ever exhausting.  
“Tell me what you know.” He growls.  
“Not much more than you.” Solo closes his eyes, takes a long drag from his cigarette. “She wasn't exactly chatty on the ride back.”  
“Did you know her ribs were broken?”  
“Yes.” Solo sighes. Smoke, weariness, leaking out,  
Ilya's hands clench, release. “She should have seen medic.”  
“She wouldn't.”  
“I wouldn't have given her a choice.”  
“She needed to have a choice.”   
“What is that supposed to mean?”  
Solo drops the cigarette and crushes it under foot. “We need to go.”  
“And who watches here?”   
Solo nods at the two men pouring coffee out of a tin flash at the end of the hallway. “CIA boys. They'll keep an eye on her until we get back.” He eyes Ilya's frown. “You can trust them.”  
“Not enough.”  
“We've got two days left to disrupt this arms deal or someone very nasty is going to get a very shiny batch of new toys. Waverly thinks Gabby has brought us someone important. He's digging into things on his end, but in the mean time, it's our turn to ask some questions.” The American's eyes flash a gunmetal black that Ilya has learned is as dangerous as his own red rages, if quieter.  
Ilya's hands clench again, tighter. “I get to ask first.”

The mission was supposed to be routine. A clean up job. Since Italy they'd been systematically buttoning up what was left of the Vinceguerra organization, one cell at a time, and they'd stumbled upon yet another madman-to-madman arms trade. It was textbook. Infiltrate the fancy party. Isolate the mark. Extricate the information, quietly, or not quietly. Save the world. It was almost boring, right until their “guest” wriggled free and ran, right until the wrench caught Ilya's skull in just the right place and his last image of Gabby was her bare feet slapping against the pavement as she kept up the chase. She always took her shoes off when it got serious....

Ilya is a big man. By the time Solo reached him, he was already halfway on his feet. Already running after her. And it was already too late.

Napoleon fills in what gaps he can on the drive to the safehouse, which is a converted bar on the other side of the warehouse district. He'd pulled up to find her sitting on the trunk of the car she'd stolen, clutching a gun that wasn't hers. The CIA was already there-- it was their safehouse-- but she wouldn't move, wouldn't let anyone touch her or the car or the gun, not until she saw Solo. She had taken his hand, turned it over, put the gun in his palm. Said that she'd seen enough of that scheißkerl so she'd wait in the car. He's got big news, she says. If you can get it out of him.

Ilya stares at the blank windows of the warehouses as they pass. “Did she say what happened while she was gone?”  
“Waverly thought it best to wait for the debrief. I concured.”   
“And you did not take her to medic.” Ilya says. “You let her bleed in car. But no medic.”   
“I took her where she wanted to go.” Napoleon said. “We'll debrief her tomorrow. Just do your job tonight. We need to know where the deal is going down. And Peril--” Solo's eyes meet his in the rearview. “That means he has to be able to talk.”  
“There are twenty-seven bones in human hand.” Ilya says, flexing his fingers. “None needed to talk.”

The conversation room, as Solo likes to call it, is in a small concrete bunker below the basement of the bar, which is empty except for a few agents posing as factory workers drinking down their day's work. Ilya follows him without speaking to any of the Americans, whom he tolerates because they are Solo's people and are therefore necessary. The local CIA chief meets them in the basement with coffee, which they accept because Waverly has told them to play nice. The coffee is burned black but Ilya appreciates this, likes the bitterness on his tongue.  
“My boys waited for you.” the CIA man says, yawning. “Seeing as it was your agent who got the bad end of it. Must be a scrappy little thing.”  
“Agent Teller is quite competent, thank you.” Solo flashes a dangerously broad smile. “Do we know who he is?”  
“He won't say. Claims he has never heard of Vinceguerra. He is just a lonely factory worker who offered a pretty girl a ride home only to be stuffed in the boot of his own car while she waved a gun in his face.” The man shrugs. “See that green couch in the corner? Wake me up when you're done with him.” He He takes Solo's untouched coffee cup and drains it. “Oh, and keep the Russian in check. Remember whose side of the Curtain this is.” He glares at Ilya then shuffles off to an ugly green couch on the other side of the room. 

Ilya ignores him, and pulls open the trap door that leads down to the bunker. Just do your job. Do it well and do it fast and you can be back with her before morning.

The agent on duty outside the Conversation Room tosses Solo the key. Solo unlocks the door to a bare, boring room with too-bright lights and a table and two metal chairs, one of which is bolted to the floor. The man cuffed at wrists and ankles to the chair is, like Gabby said, wearing an ugly sweater, a pumpkin orange and fungus-green monstrosity that is speckled with blood, some of which is from the gash in his forehead and some of which-- Ilya will not think whose it is. Do your job. He looks away from the blood, studies the rest of the man: short, squat, but strong, like a small tank. It'd be easy to think he was just hired muscle if it weren't for his eyes: snake's eyes, small and black and bright with intelligence and malice. The man catches Ilya's gaze and he holds it, mocking.

“When I saw you last,” he said, his English carrying just a smooth Italian accent. “you were bleeding from my wrench. I could have killed you then, you know. I did you a favor, amico. Are you here to do me one?”   
“Maybe.” Solo says, strolling over to the other chair. “What do you want?”  
“We could start with a nice Chianti. Maybe bring that little girl back to pour it out for me....”  
Ilya's fingers tap, tap, tap against his thigh.

“I'm surprised you want to see her again,” Solo says, lightly. “That gash in your forehead must hurt like hell.”  
“This is a love-tap.” The man grins. “We play rough.”

Ilya calls on Chekov again but he can't get past the first two words. A country house A country house. Twenty-seven bones in the hand. 

Solo's smile never falters. “I thought you told the nice men in suits that you were just an unlucky good Samaritan.”  
The man shrugs, bunching up that horrid sweater. “You are not one of the nice men.”  
“No, I am not.” Solo nods back at Ilya. “And neither is he. You can chose which of us you'd prefer to talk to. Completely your decision. Although I believe he wants very much to break your fingers.”  
“Because of the little agent girl?” A wicked, yellow-tooth smile. “The one we played with?”

Ilya has half-convinced himself that they don't need this man. He's just dumb muscle. A hunting dog. Expendable. He and Solo can find the information another way, after they've snapped this one's neck and burned the body, which in its sweater should be eminently flammable....

“No, he just Russian. Breaking fingers is their idea of a conversation starter” Solo does this often, this caricature of Ilya, and it works because he is Russian and he has broken fingers at the start of more than one conversation so people tend to believe that he'll do it again. “Although, professionally speaking, we've got a right to be mildly offended. ”  
“Professionally speaking, she begged like a whore.”

He screams next, screams several times because Ilya breaks his fingers one at a time, just three, very quickly, just the left hand. He doesn't scream after that because Ilya's hand closes around his throat, holding his face up, close. Somewhere under the pain-fog, something in the man's oil-slick eyes gleams. Something is triumphant. It occurs to Ilya that he should kill him, and quickly, because there's more than just brute hate behind those eyes. There's something coiled.

But then Solo disentangles him, making a show of pushing him back against the wall and restraining him, though it's only half a charade. The red mist is seeping into the edges of his field of vision.

“We should just shoot him,” Ilya growls, low. The man hears and laughs.

“Yes, you dumb Russian bastard, shoot me. Shoot me and thousands of your little Commie friends die horribly when my customer gets his chemical bombs. But what will it matter?”

Solo steps away from Ilya, straightens his jacket. “No one is going to shoot you.” He glares at Ilya, who shrugs. “Not if you're helpful. You can start with a name.”  
“A name.” The man grins. “So intimate. We barely know each other. She wouldn't even give me her name, even after all our time together. And you want my name, right now, after he has broken my fingers and you have given me no assurances.”  
“I can assure you that broken fingers will be the least of your worries if I let the dumb Russian back over to that table.”  
“Threats are boring. If you were going to torture this out of me, I'd have been hooked up to a car battery hours ago.”  
“I can also assure you that if you cooperate, we can guarantee you a good life in some lovely American city. Or, if you like winter and misery, some lovely Russian city. You'll have saved all those thousands of lives. Vinceguerra is dead. Your organization is dying. Do the right thing by yourself.”  
“And do those assurances come with your name?” The man says. “I like to know who I am getting into bed with.”  
“You haven't made it to my bed yet,” Solo said. “We're still at the part where I decide whether to take you home or dump you in an alley. Tell me who you are and what intel you can offer me.”  
“My name is Michael Araldi. You can check it. It is my real name. I do not hide myself like you spies. I was proud of the Vinceguerras. I was proud to work with them..”  
“And what do you do for them?”  
“I arrange meetings. I make sure the products get where they need to be one time, and I remove.... obstacles.”   
“Do you know where the exchange is taking place?”  
The man grins. “I am the exchange. I set it all up. The meeting will not happen without me.”  
“If you are so proud of the Vinceguerras, what makes me think I can trust you?”  
“Like you said. They are dead now. I am still alive. I would like to keep it that way.”  
“We're going to need something up front.” Solo says. “Something substantial. If I think it's sexy, then I'll call my boss. If he thinks it's sexy, then we can negotiate.”  
“594 Rue de la Fontaine.”  
“Is that meant to be helpful? France is full of Rue de la Fontaine ”   
“It's in Brittany. A chic little flat for the scientist who upgraded the bombs for us. Send the Russian to break his fingers or whatever else you'd like. But call your boss quickly. While I am still in the mood.”  
Solo gestures for Ilya to follow him out of the room. In the hallway, away from the Araldi's smug smile and oily eyes, Ilya can take a breath without worrying that he will explode.   
“We owe him something” Ilya said. “Broken fingers just down payment.”   
“I agree.” Solo says, his smile gone. “But he's also right. He's our best shot at stopping something very bad and he knows it.”  
“The car battery would be a better idea.”  
“He would lie. He'd lie very well and very stubbornly.”  
“Two battery. Higher voltage.”  
“There is no time, Peril. We'd have to check out whatever lead he gave us, even if it was a lie, because we couldn't take a chance. Not with this kind of weaponry up for grabs. “  
“So we keep up your flirting?”  
Solo's mouth twitches in irritation. “A little charm is useful in negotiation.”   
“Negotiation with cockroaches.”  
“Yes. A cockroach.” Solo fixes his eyes on Ilya. “One who hurt Gabby. Don't act like you are the only one who feels that. But don't act like you can't do your job.”  
“Is not the same. For you”  
“You've said that once before.”  
Ilya presses his knuckles into the cinderblock wall, hard enough to scrape off the skin, hard enough for a blush of blood. Every alarm bell in his head, every instinct, clamors at him to open the door and wring that bastard's neck. And every bit of his training, every bit of his experience, tells him that Solo is right, that this is their best chance. Their only chance. He drags his fist along the wall, leaving a tiny trail of blood, thinking how easy it would be to smash everything in this hallway.

“Call Waverly.” he says. “Set up the deal.”

The usual phone call follows. A CIA team sweeps the Brittany apartment, retrieves the scientist, and the blueprints for his modifications, which elegant and brutal. Araldi has made his point. His intel is good. The stakes are high. Even though he's handcuffed to a metal chair in a concrete bunker, he's the one with the leverage.  
The usual negotiations.   
Ilya leaves all this to Solo because he wants nothing to do with the bastard unless it involves breaking things. He's compiled a mental list during the hours that they've waited. He could disassemble the Italian thug with the same precision that Gabby takes apart a faulty car engine and in less time. This thought takes him back to Gabby, alone in the hotel room with her bruises and broken bones and whatever else he cannot see. He tells himself that Araldi's talk was bravado. Button-pushing. But he will not know for sure, will not know how bad it really was until he can see her in something other than shadow. He should be in her hotel room carrying her to bed, not in a concrete hallway making deals with vermin.  
The usual bad taste in his mouth, after the deal is struck.  
But worse.  
Ilya doesn't realize how much worse until Solo emerges from the room, his flawless smile flagging from more than loss of sleep, and tells him exactly what Araldi wants.   
“No.”  
“Waverly has okayed it.”  
“Trakhat' yego.”  
“I told him that.” Solo closes his eyes, pinches the bridge of his nose. “Or the English version, at any rate. But the deal stands. This is too important. And you know that. I know that. We've only got two days--”  
“Napoleon--”  
Solo waves him quiet. “I can stall for an hour. Maybe two. Go.”

 

**

For the first ten minutes, Ilya paces the worn burgundy carpet outside the hotel room.  
He has never not wanted to return to her. Not until now.  
The hotel rooms were the space between the missions and the silences after the missions. Some slipstream out of time where he and Gabby don't have to explain why he needs to wake to the morning light on her cheek and she needs to sleep the weight of his arm over her chest. Not lovers. Not yet, even here. Something else, something ineffable.  
And now this.  
When he opens the door, the entire suite blazes with light and Gabby is the darkness at the center: black slacks, heavy black turtleneck, even in this end of summer heat. Every inch of her guarded. Her wet hair in damp curls around her neck, her hands closed around an empty glass.   
“I wanted to be drunk,” she says, her German accent thicker, which means she is exhausted, and he wonders when she slept. “But Waverly called. We are to expect company.”  
“Solo sent me ahead. We have a little time.”  
“Waverly said he requested me to be present in his security detail. Room service.” She snorts and then winces.   
“He is a small, filthy man who thinks he is important.” He takes off his jacket, hangs it on the door. “You took his gun. You put him in the trunk of his own car. Embarrassed him. Now he wants to embarrass you. A stupid man. A kakerlake.“  
He uses her language, which brings a ghost of a grin to her lips.   
“Waverly says two days. Are we to entertain him?”  
“Not we.” He sits down on the chair across from her. “Solo and I can handle him. You do not have to speak to him. You do not have to look at him. If he shows disrespect, I break his other hand.”  
“The other hand?”  
He coughes. “Maybe I already broke one. Just two fingers.”   
Her left eyebrow arches. Her eyes pin him, wriggling.  
“Or three. Hard to tell.” He stands, to avoid her stare and retrieves the battered medical kit. “We should look to your injuries.”  
“Ilya, I'm fine.”  
“You are not fine. You are on mission. You can be not-fine back in England. Here you have to be ready. What is broken?”  
He is asking for the mission, of course, and not so he can take it out of the Italian later, bone and bruise.  
“Just my ribs. I think. It hurts to breathe.” Whatever pain she's suffocating flickers into her eyes, like smoke, and dissipates just as quickly. “Of course it's tolerable.”  
“Of course.” He sets the medical kit down on the table in front of the couch. She shakes her head.   
“Not out here,” she says. “Company could interrupt.” 

In the bedroom, she won't sit on the bed until he locks the door. Untils she checks the lock and the drawer with her gun and the other drawer with her other gun and the wrench she keeps under the bed. She's double-counting the small black case of knives when he catches her wrist. Stills her. Her blood beating bird-wings against his fingers.   
“Enough.” He whispers.   
“This is supposed to be a safe place.” She drops to the edge of the mattress, deflates. Her hand still in his.   
“I will make it a safe place.” His thumb, scraped from the wall of the conversation room, brushes the broken skin of her knuckles. Rough skin on rough.  
“Yes,” Her eyes fix him, again, right through the chest. “Except for when you can't.”   
He drops her hand, as if burned. She shrugs. “C'mon Ubermensch. Let's get it done.”  
She is silent as he prepares the bandages, eyes blazing black, and he thinks he's lost her to the angry space she holds around her like a fortress, but when he reaches for the hem of her turtleneck, she grabs his wrist.   
“Remember this is just business, Ilya.” Her voice soft, shaking. “Just part of the game.” Ilya understands what this means-- dont' disappear. Don't break anything. Solo would be btter at this-- the man has surgeon's hands-- but it can't wait. And he won't trust anyone else, even Solo, to touch her tonight. Ilya’s hands are too big, too clumsy, but at least they know her.  
It's the first time he's seen her in full light, and it is worse than he thought, damn it, but he doesn't flinch, just maps it, every bruise and cigarette burn, every fingerprint and boot and belt cut. He wants to drop to his knees and cover every inch of her with his mouth, begging her forgiveness. He is dizzy with what he will do to the bastards who hurt her once this deal is done, once Waverly cuts Araldi loose. Dizzy with the hunger of it, with the blood of it. But he cannot think of what he will destroy, not yet. He touches the angry red swell on her left side, whisper-light, and she sucks her breath in.  
“Keep breathing,” he says. “Deep. It will hurt. But you won't get pneumonia.”  
She nods, teeth gritted. He begins to wrap her ribs, slowly.  
A small silence, until he is done. Until he eases the turtleneck back over her shoulders, pulls her damp hair out of the collar.   
“They took the dress off,” she says. Not a whisper. Not angry. Just flat. “He said it would be a shame to ruin it. He gave it back to me before the potato field.” She doesn't look at him. She stares out the window by the bed and he isn't sure she's talking to him, that she remembers he is still beside her. “It was a nice dress. Chanel.”  
He hears Chekov, again, in his head.  
A country house on a terrace. In front of it, a garden. In an avenue of trees, under an old poplar, stands a table for tea....  
His hands shaking. Arms too. Up to the elbow.  
“Ilya--” Like always, she calls him out of his head. Small hands on his balled fists. “Ignore me. I am just rambling. It is nothing.”   
Beyond their room, the click of the door opening and Solo calling a too loud, too cheery, too careless hello that is as much a warning as it is a greeting. Company has arrived.  
“Stay in here,” he says. “You do not have to go out.”  
“I'm not hiding from a fat little tarakan.” Now she uses his language. Now it is his turn to almost smile. She bares her teeth, a fierce grin. “Besides, you might find a reason to hit him and I want to watch.”

 

**

The Italian is drunk.  
Solo deposits him on the couch as if flinging a chunk of rotten meat away from his hands and vanishes into his bedroom, no doubt to the flask of bourbon he thinks they don't know about. Ilya does not begrudge him this. Even the Cowboy has to catch his breath. Araldi sprawls on the couch, red-faced. (it is not Gabby's couch now, just the couch, just like no longer their room, just the room). He squints at Ilya.  
“You, Russian. My hand hurts. Give me morphine.” An exaggerated groan.   
“We are not hospital” Ilya sets his chess set out on the card table across the room.   
“More wine, then.”  
“You're drunk enough.”  
“This from a Russian.” Araldi spits. “Do you even drink wine, comrade, or do you just suck vodka straight out of Kruschev's dick?”  
Ilya ignores him. He sets out the queen, the king. The knight. The pawn.   
Gabby, quiet on the edges of the room. Walking toward the card table, her face always to the couch, always wary. Ilya can make out the hard edge of a gun tucked in her waistband under the turtleneck. She folds herself into the chair beside him. She is quiet, and Araldi is drunk, but he sees her and smiles, a wide, rat-tooth smile.  
“Piccolina!” He nods to her, lifts her good head in an imaginary salute. “Little one! No hard feelings, eh? Tell your Russian bear ! He stares at me like he'll eat my liver.”  
“With onions.” She says. Sweetness and cyanide. “Or perhaps raw.”  
He laughs, long and longer. “Such sharp tongue you have, piccolina. But remember who it was that let you keep it--”   
Ilya presses the pawn into his palm, the sharp edge a pin-point for his thoughts. The subtle shake of Gabby's head tells him what he already knows: Don't get up. It's what he wants. A scene. A sliver under the fingernail. Wanting to know what makes Ilya flinch.  
“What do they call you, piccolina? I had to tell everyone my name. The American tells me he is Jones. I suppose you will say you are Schmidt? And the Russian beast....let me guess....Tolstoy!” More laughter. “Or does he make you call him Stalin when he wants to eat you raw? Puttana tedesca.”  
This time it is the whole weight of Gabby's hand on his forearm that tethers him.  
She quietly pushes her chair back from the table and takes what's left of the bottle of vodka from the liquor cabinet. She crosses the room and without ceremony, without even a twitch of her jaw, pours the entire remaining contents onto Araldi's face. He coughs, sputters, curses, red-faced, but he's smart enough to stay on the couch. She regards him with dispassionate disgust, like something she's wiped off her shoe in the street. Ilya has never seen her this flat. Every mission, every fight has been a fireball, as if she takes it all personally, every punch an insult, but now she's blank and capable of anything.  
There's that gun in her waistband.  
But she walks back to the table, just as quietly, and moves her chess piece.  
Just in time for Solo to stroll out of the bedroom, the top two buttons on his collar undone, and wrinkle his nose. “Why does everything smell like vodka?”   
“He wanted a drink.” Gabby says, her eyes on the chess board.   
Solo eyes the still-dripping Araldi. “I see.”  
His eyes travel to Gabby, then to Ilya, asking if she's in hand, and the American doesn't know, doesn't know how much she's contained herself tonight. Ilya knows. He has spent years of his life in small rooms with people he's not allowed to kill, no matter what they say, no matter what they do to him, he's taken the insults and worse, no flinching, even though it feels like someone's peeling back his skin like a peach. He's used to it. He does not want Gabby to be used to it. It occurs to him maybe she was already used to it, long before he got to her. Which is why she is so extravagantly angry, so impulsive. She refuses to behave any longer.  
“She's ruined my clothes,” Araldi says.  
“I'll get something for you to dry off.” Solo smiles, solicitous, though Ilya can see his partner is hiding his amusement at Araldi's indignance.   
“And a bottle of wine. Good wine. Because we are friends now, Jones. You and me and Schmidt and Tolstoy. All good friends.”  
“Buoni amici” Solo says, tossing him a towel. He sets a bottle of something expensive on the table in front of Araldi.“Alla vostra salute.”  
“Pour it for me, friend. My hand is injured.” A pointed stare at Ilya.   
“You'll manage.” Solo says. “If you're motivated.”  
Araldi pats his face dry and fumbles with the bottle to fill his glass. Red wine sloshes onto the table, onto the floor. No one moves to clean it up. He eases back onto the couch.  
“You should reign in your woman,” Araldi says to Ilya.   
“She is her own woman. What she does with her vodka is none of my concern.”” Ilya remains focused on his half-hearted game of chess with Gabby. She moves her pieces mechanically, without thought. He could have ended the game three times already and both of them know it but they just keep moving pieces. Circling.   
Araldi snorts. Solo turns on the radio and they pretend to listen to mediocre jazz while the Italian drinks and complains about the volume. Every time he complains, Gabby turns the radio up louder until the air is one shriek of trombones and trumpets. Exhausted as she is, she can't help but sway just a little to the music; every bone of her is a dancer, tired or not, beaten or not. Araldi's eyes follow her hips.  
“I am bored.” He shouts, his voice so thick with wine he is barely coherent. “I want to dance.”  
“By all means,” says Solo. “Tap or ballet? I'll bet you do a lovely pirouette.”  
A bellow of laughter. “I want to dance with her.” He waves his wine glass at Gabby, sloshing more wine onto his sweater. “Come, piccolina. Let's show them the steps we learned....”  
She clicks the radio off.  
The silence rings in their ears. Araldi tries to stand up but his legs give out and he misses the couch on the way down. He knocks over the table. Ilya looks away in disgust. Cockroach.   
Solo rolls his eyes and hauls Araldi back onto the couch. “It's not your night for dancing.”  
“Then you dance with her. You and the Russian. Both of you. So that I will not be bored.”  
Solo ignores him, collects the ruined towel and the empty wine bottle.  
“Or maybe I have better idea.” Araldi's smile turns ugly. His burnt-black eyes gleam ugly and bright and fix squarely on Ilya. “Let's turn the German whore over the couch and split her like a pig--”  
Solo breaks the bottle over his head.   
Araldi crumples like a sack of wet garbage.  
Solo cuffs his wrist to the foot of the couch. He steps back, lights another cigarette.  
“My apologies, Gabby.” He says. “I should have let you be the one to do that.”  
She doesn't respond. She hasn't moved from beside the radio, her hands balled into fists, her jaw locked  
“Go to bed.” he says.   
Her fists ball tighter, smaller, whiter at the knuckles.   
“Gabby.” He touches her elbow.  
Ilya feels the touch as if on his own elbow. He flinches. He can't get up yet, can't trust himself to move without walking over to Araldi's body and snapping his neck. Chicken bones. Instead, he arranges the chess pieces, square by square. He arranges himself, square by square. He knows this work. Make the deal. Deliver the goods. Chess pieces and pawns.   
“He could wake up.” she says. “You didn't hit him that hard.”  
“I hit him hard enough.” Solo says. “And I'll be out here. In that terribly uncomfortable armchair. If he wakes up, I'll know.”  
“I can handle it.” she says. “I can do the job.”  
He tucks a stray strand of hair behind her ear, a gesture Ilya would begrudge anyone else. “Not if you're too exhausted to stand.”

She takes the cigarette out of his mouth, puts it between her lips, and walks away from them all.

Solo turns out the lights, one by one, until just the city bleeds through the window.   
He sits down in the armchair across from Araldi's couch and picks a piece of something small and glittering from his hand. “I am sure I have met nastier men,” he says. “But it's been a while since I have wanted so badly to kill one of them.” He flicks the speck of glass at the unconscious man.  
Ilya grunts. “For once we agree.”   
“Did she really douse him in vodka?”  
“Yes.”  
Solo sighs, wistfully. “Wish I'd seen that.”  
Ilya nods. “Was glorious.”   
“How is she?”  
“I bandaged the ribs.”  
“I'm not talking about her ribs.”  
“I know that.” Ilya says. He is quiet a moment, gathering his words. “This will not be the last time she is hurt. It will not be the worst time.”  
Even in the dark he can see Solo roll his eyes. “Please tell me that was not what you told her.”  
“No.” Ilya says. “I did not tell her. I told her she was safe. I lied.”  
“It's not your fault.” Solo's voice is uncharacteristically sincere. Ilya hates it when Cowboy is sincere. It means that nerves are exposed. Raw. “We can't deflect everything that comes her way.”  
“Then what can we do?” The question escapes him before he knows he's asked it. A weak question. An inescapable question.  
“I don't think you're going to be able to answer that out here with me.” 

In the bedroom there are no windows to the street, no bleed of light, just a darkness that seems to Ilya, when he walks in the door, to stretch out in all directions like a lake. Black and treacherous. He can do nothing but wade in, even though he's not sure of the depth. He's not sure at which point he'll be over his head. Even in the dark he makes out her shape on the edge of the bed, hunched, poised for some defense, hands coiled around the dull glint of her wrench. For the second time this night, Ilya finds himself on his knees without thinking. He unwraps her fingers from the cold metal. Kisses each one, with their taste of steel and blood and the faintest hint of engine grease. 

“We sleep now.” He lifts the wrench to slide it under the bed but she grabs it. Clings. “Is okay.” He says. “I will keep one eye open for us.”  
Her mouth keeps its hard line but her hands relax, let him take the wrench. She does not protest when he pulls the blankets down on the bed and eases her between the cool sheets. She watches him, through the dark, as he unties his boots. Pulls off his socks. He keeps the gun, which he will put beneath his pillow, not because he doesn't trust Cowboy, or the handcuffs, or his own hands, but because he wants her to feel it if she stretches out her hand in the night. Wants her to know that he will not be caught by surprise. That this room is safe. Or perhaps the gun is to convince himself of these things.   
This is not the first time they have shared a too-small bed in the dark after ugly mission, and their bodies remember how to fit together. Her back curled to him, spine pressing into him, head tucked against his heart, which she has told him (once, when she was drunk and overly honest) is like a lullaby. Something to help her sleep. Normally he would drape his arm over her but tonight he hesistates, unsure what will hurt her.  
She takes his wrist and pulls his arms over her beneath the blanket, which she pulls up almost over her head. “You aren't hurting me,” she says. He wonders if he has spoken, but no, she just knows him in this way.  
How long are they silent, unmoving, unsleeping?  
How long until he asks the question he has kept off his tongue all night?  
Only it is not a question. It is an entreaty.  
“Tell me what happened.”  
She tightens, spring-coiled against his chest.

“He was distracted.” She mutters.  
“Why?”  
“It does't matter.”  
“To me it matters.”  
“It shouldn't. All of this is part of our job. All the things.”  
“I am not in here for the job.” 

When she speaks again, her words are small and clipped, like bullet casings.

“He let me out of the trunk in the middle of the field. Full dark. No moon. Nothing. He told me to kneel in the dirt and he put his gun in my mouth. He pulled up the dress to my waist and I thought about the stories my mother had told me about the soldiers and about the Stasi, the lessons she gave on how to leave your body when you have to, where you can go.”  
He wants to clutch her to him and cling but he keeps his touch light. Delicate. He has to hear this out. He has to know. He has to keep still, keep breathing; why does it feel like his ribs are broken too, like each breath is tight and stretched and thin. \

“But I'm not good at that. My body never lets me leave. Ever. He put his hand around my throat and took the gun out of my mouth. He put it... somewhere else. He told me to be still or he'd shoot me in the gut instead of the head and I would bleed out in the dirt. I told him he should have already shot me. And he laughed, and said I was a brave girl and he was wasting me, out here, but it was business and when he pulled down my...when he decided to get on with the business he had to let go of my throat to fumble with his damn zipper...he thought the gun would keep me still but it didn't. We fought. He broke my ribs but I got the gun. I should have shot him. Instead I made him get in the trunk and I brought him to you. And now he is asleep in our hotel room. Just Business. Fucking business.”

She draws his hand up to cover her face. His thumb traces her the bone of her eye, down her jawbone, under her chin. He draws her as close to him as he can, his arms as firm as he can be without hurting her because she needs to know he means this. His mouth against her ear.   
“When this is over,” he says, “I am going to kill him. You need to understand this.” He kisses the small, soft spot behind her ear. The side of her neck. “ I am not going to use my gun. I am going to use my hands. It will be intimate. He's going to know it is for you.”

She rolls over, gasping from the movement, and covers his mouth with a kiss that will not relent. He cups her head in his palms, refusing to breathe, refusing to breathe until she does.   
“You can't kill them all, Ilya.” She whispers this, in between kisses, the words light against the corner of his mouth. 

She sleeps, then.  
He doesn't.   
He is in that potato field, a flickering gray ghost, watching the gun and what's done with it, an endless loop. She is always strong, and she always gets the gun in the end, but it's what happens first that he can't stop no matter how many times he puts himself between. He is only a ghost. His hands go right through.  
Her weight and warmth in his arms is all that keeps him from blood.  
Solo materializes out of the gray before dawn, when Ilya is half-awake, half in fugue, and the American is almost shot for it. “We need to talk. Before she wakes up.”   
Gabby sleeps, almost peaceful, and Ilya is careful not to wake her when he untangles himself from the bed, stretching to loosen the muscles that are complaining from a night in cramped quarters. He follows Solo out into the sitting room, where Araldi, still handcuffed to the leg of the couch, is waking in ill temper.  
“You are a bad host, Jones.” he says, picking glass out of his hair. “And you do not keep our terms.”  
“What is he talking about?” Ilya asks Solo.  
“We can talk in my room--”  
“Where is she?” Araldi shouts. “Wake her up. Piccolina. Little bird whore.”  
Ilya doesn't need a wine bottle to shut him up this time. He will wrap his hand around the bastard's throat and squeeze--  
But Solo's hand on his arm pulls him back. “A word, Peril. Now.”  
“What did you promise him?” He grinds the word out between his teeth. “On the phone with Waverly. What did you do?”  
“You look surprised, comrade.” Araldi chuckles. “Your American friend didn't tell you? I help you out. I am big hero. I fuck your German. I wanted six hours but the Englishman only gave me three. Still...”  
Ilya's hand closes around Solo's throat. He drags the American into the other bedroom and only lets him breathe because he needs to know what is happening, what he missed.  
“I will kill both of you. I swear to God.”   
“You don't believe in God.”  
“This is not a fucking joke.”  
“I am not joking.” Solo straightens his tie, which somehow even after a night in the chair is still smooth. “I didn't tell you because you needed to not be murderous last night. For Gabby's sake. For all of us.”  
“You made this deal.” Ilya doesn't know why it makes him so angry. Solo is a professional. So is he. But when it comes to her, there was supposed to be an understanding. They were supposed to deflect.  
“I hate this deal.” Solo snaps. “So does Waverly.”  
“Then why--”  
“The chemist. The one Araldi gave up. We found schematics....it's bad. Bad enough that Araldi gets whatever he wants. The chemicals in that bomb are made for mass civilian targets. Hospitals. City streets. And it won't be quick. People will suffer.”  
“So she suffers instead. Without a choice.”  
“She will choose to finish the mission.” From some drawer beside his bed, Solo produces a tiny silver flask and takes a very long drink.   
“Damn the mission.”  
“And damn all the innocent people that will die?”  
“Yes. All of them.”

Solo's left eyebrow arches. “If I thought you believed that, you'd be out. I'd call Waverly myself. We all knew what was in this line of work.”  
“I did. You did. She just wanted out of the Wall.”  
“This is her new life.” Solo said. “And ours. If we want to keep it-- any of it-- then we do the deals and agree to terms and when it's ugly we take it.” The slightest crack in his voice. “We can't always take it for her.”  
“That bastard will kill her.”  
“We'll be supervising.”'  
“He will kill her anyway. He is angry because she humiliated him. He doesn't want to fuck her. He wants to hurt her.”  
“We'll be supervising very closely. There'll be ground rules.”  
“Ground rules. You going to stand there and watch it, Cowboy?”  
“If I have to.” Solo finishes off the flask and tosses it into the shadows. “You certainly won't be able to do it.” He eyes Ilya's shaking hands. “Should I be worried for the furniture? You can break the end table if you like; it's hideous. I'm not overly attached to the chair either. Or you can go break another of his fingers. I'll pretend to stop you.”  
Ilya considers the offer.  
He considers choking out the American, shooting the Italian, and carrying Gabby out to the car and running, somewhere, some edge of the earth, some place invisible...  
….where he knows she would never forgive him. People will suffer. She would never accept that cost.

“How long until the exchange?” he asks Solo.   
“Thirty-six hours.”  
“Give me twenty-four”  
“Peril--”  
“I will find another way.”  
“You don't even know where to start--”  
“Gabby remembers a field. We will start there. Araldi didn't work alone. And he is not silent type. He talked to someone, and we will find that someone and we will make him talk to us.”  
“We--”  
“I am not leaving her here.”  
“She's not allowed to leave.” Solo says. “Agent Teller is a critical asset. She has to stay here until Araldi gives up the location of the bomb and the exchange site--”   
“You can pretend to stop me.” Ilya almost smiles. “I haven't gotten to hit you in a while.”

Solo rolls his eyes and yanks open the top drawer beside the bed. He tosses Ilya several bundles of money. “Twenty four hours. Wear a tracker. Make her wear a tracker. Take the mission dossier. Something in it might be useful. Take the good guns and the card for my French contact.” He flips a small business card in Ilya's direction. “Waverly doesn't know about him yet. Tell him to get you whatever you want and I'll get him another Monet”  
Ilya nods.  
“If you come up empty-handed, you will bring her back and we will all do our job like the bastards we are. If you don't come back, I will send them to find you and bring her back. Partner or not.”  
“Understood.” Ilya pockets the money and the card. He is already out the door when Solo's voice, unexpectedly taut, catches him in the back.  
“Peril--”  
He turns back around.  
“Don't come back emptyhanded.”

**   
He closes the door and it is like diving underwater.

Araldi shouts at him, some profanity, some obscenity that he can't hear, that doesn't exist for him. He only hears the click of the doorknob to Gabby's room. Her breathing. Her body stirring under the blankets. He opens a black duffel and throws every single weapon he can find in the room into the bag. The medical kit. His own pile of money. His gadgets. Ammo clips. The passports. The trackers-- which he does not know if he will activate-- and the mission file. Gabby is still dressed from last night, good clothes, practical clothes. No beautiful dresses, no high heels. 

She is still asleep when he picks her up, still in her blankets, and carries her out of the hotel room. Down to the car. He sets her in the back seat, tucking the edges of the blanket around her, and when she starts to wake, he hushes her. Not yet, Gabby. Still sleep. She relaxes. He will wake her, but not here. He will tell her what they need to do, but he will not tell her why. He will lie. Invent some crisis. She'll believe him.   
He glances back up at the the window of the hotel room, Solo is a shadow watching them. 

Ilya closes his eyes. Draws a breath. 

A country house on a terrace. In front of it, a garden. In an avenue of trees, under an old poplar, stands a table for tea, with a samovar...

The car's engine springs to life.

**

Ten miles later, or twenty, long enough for the baguettes he bought fresh from a sleep bakery to have cooled, long enough for the stainless steel thermos of coffee to no longer scald their throats, he stops the car. Past dawn. Past sunrise, past the beauty of waking. It's just morning now. No visible sun, just gray light everywhere and nowhere. It's been thirty minutes since they left the hotel. He's already got the sense that they are too late, can feel seconds slipping past his skin like he's standing in a lake trying to catch minnows. His hands are bear hands. Clumsy and inefficient. He can't stop time.

Gaby sits up in the backseat, wrapped in the blanket, eyes bleary and one hand un c.onsciously cradling her broken ribs. He hands her the bread without speaking. Unscrews the lid of the thermos and fills itfe with black coffee, which he tastes first, and when it doesn't burn his tongue, he passes it into her cold hands. She hunches over it as over a fire. Eats in silence. He drinks straight from the thermos, counting on the caffeine to counteract four nights of sleeping in snatches. After she was taken, he thought he could hold out until she was found, until he could sleep knowing she was in the next room again, safe. Then she came back and he realized he was wrong. No rooms were safe anymore. No spaces between bullets. No time between.

Another five minutes.

“Where are we?” She says. Hoarse. “Why aren't we in the hotel?”  
“There is a new development.” He says. “We can't rely on Araldi anymore.”  
“Did you kill him?” Her eyes, in the rearview, meet his.   
“No.”  
She looks back into her coffee. “Why isn't Solo here?”  
“He's working another lead.”  
“We have no leads.”   
“He didn't work alone. We'll find his colleagues. We'll have conversations.”  
“You and Solo have ruined that word for me.” A half-grin. Something in her is warming and it wakens him more than the coffee. “Where are we going to find them?”  
“The last place he went.”  
Her fingers whiten around the cap of the thermos.  
“I don't think you were the only one he took there. Maybe someone knows something. Maybe someone saw something. Do you remember a house? A village?”  
“I was in the trunk.”  
“But later he was in the trunk. And you had the gun.” He says this to remind her, that no matter what else happened in the field, she had the gun at the end.   
“I drove too fast to see much.” She said. “But there was a town, not far from the field. A small place, a forgettable place. I scattered the chickens in the street. I passed an old factory outside town. Boarded up. But I thought I saw one of Araldi's men by the side door, smoking. I knew his face. I knew his cigarettes too.” She touches a burn on the side of her neck. “I thought I was imagining things. I kept driving. But maybe I was not imagining.”  
“Was that where they kept you?” He is professional about this.   
“I never saw the outside. But it could have been. The room was all concrete and steel. It smelled of old cat food. And other things, later.” She says this with that same flatness as in the hotel room. Clinical. Calm. “Move over.” She tosses the crumbs from her baguette out the window and drains the last of the coffee. “I'll drive.”

**

Gaby drives like she hates the car, like she wants to punish it, gears strained, engine hot, brakes grinding. White-knuckles on the wheel. Ilya checks and re-checks the guns and the ammo clips. Tucks the knives into their secret places. He reviews what he knows about the Vinciguerra operations. Local cells are small, discreet, easily movable. Victoria discouraged communication between cells; each head operative checked in with her directly, which meant her death left the operation disoriented. He has a theory growing in the back of his head that men like Araldi see this as an opportunity to reconsolidate. Maybe this arms deal was a way to assert his importance. He's not just local muscle, at least not anymore. But still authortarian. Enjoyed his power. His men wouldn't know what to do without him, not right away. They'd be waiting at the warehouse for him to come back. Maybe half a dozen. No more than ten. Ilya doesn't expect them to know anything, but he'll have conversations with them anyway. He'll let Gaby watch. Or maybe he'll watch. She's got an instinct for pain. She's better at this job than he wants to admit.  
The Vinceguerra protocol was to keep on-site information to a minimum, but if Araldi had ambitions, maybe he kept his own files. Maybe they'll be that lucky. If they aren't lucky, they'll have lost three hours, maybe four. He expects Solo will stick to his word-- twenty hours until, as the American likes to say, the cavalry will come. Only it won't be a rescue. It'll be enforcement.   
He checks the gun again. Traces its sharp edges, its reassuring chill.  
They have time.  
He has time.  
Damn it.

Gaby stops the car dead center in an empty dirt road thirty miles into nowhere. She leans her forehead against the steering wheel and rolls down the window. Outside, birdsong against silence. Smell of dirt and sun. The engine idling. “Here.” She says. “It was here. I remember the broken stone wall.”   
Ilya follows her gaze out the window, to the field. In the sunlight it is unremarkable. Almost tranquil. Add a few peasant women in scarves and it could be a scene from one the paintings Napoleon can't keep from stealing. Something Old World and expensive. Gaby's hands are shaking at her sides. He covers the back of her neck with his hand, rubs the taut muscles. Reminds her that she is here and he is here. “Keep driving.” He says. “Keep driving and it will be just a field.”  
He says this to comfort her but he knows he's wrong. He knows she's drawing out the same kind of map in her head that he has in his own mind, the same kind that Solo has, the map all of them carry. Places of harm. Places of smallness. Places not to remember and not to forget.

“We should talk about how we're going to handle the factory.”  
“No talk.” Ilya says. “You stay in car. Watch exits. Shoot anyone who tries to run. I will clear the building and then radio you.”  
“No.” She bites her lip, her jaw set into the familiar hard line that he knows means an argument. “I'm not staying.”  
“You do not need to go back into that place.” He says. “Is not useful. You have injury.”   
“I can handle it.” She glares at him.   
“We should be strategic.” He keeps his face impassive. They've had this argument dozens of times. He rarely wins. “Someone has to do surveillance. Solo isn't here.”  
“I am clearing that building with you.” She shifts the car into gear. “With my own gun.”

**

Stay behind me, he says, but she doesn't.  
She's small and fast, sometimes he forgets how fast, and she runs ahead and takes the guard by the door without even stopping. One shot kill.   
“Keep them alive,” He holds her back. “We have to ask questions.” She nods but he isn't sure she's heard him. He isn't sure she can hear anything, she's already on fire, already white hot. She's already pulled away from him and kicked in the door, because she doesn't care what is waiting on the other side, because she wouldn't even feel the bullet that killed her. At this point he realizes this is not a tactical strike. Not information retrieval. This is a siege. He has to get in front of her. She's not a good shot yet, but she keeps firing until two more fall and return fire drives her behind a desk, splintering wood in her face. Three men fire down at them from the second floor but he takes them quickly. A tug at his left sleeve; a familiar burn of a bullet just close enough to graze. Her eyes black and wide.  
“Schite.”  
She rolls out from behind the desk, barrels down the hall, blind, screaming at the poor bastard who's ducking around the doorway for a second shoot. She is faster. She was probably aiming for his face but she got his gut instead, a messy shot, blood-blooms and viscera. Ilya pulls her down just before the wall beside her splinters after another barrage from further down the hall. He covers her (indignant, screaming) while he returns fire until the shooting stops. Until more blood blooms.   
“Watch hallway.” He pants. “I empty rooms.”  
Back to back, they work the rest of the hall. No more shooting. Each room opens to silence.  
“There should be more of them.” He says.   
“There was an office,” she says. “Left at the end of the hall. When they left my door open, I could see in the window. Papers. Maps. Filing cabinets. Some squirrely fuck with a camera.”  
The office is empty by the time they get there. Papers scattered. A mug of coffee still steaming beside a half-burnt cigarette. An open back door, and a scrawny man in shirt-sleeves clutching a briefcase and running for his car. Gaby launches herself after him while Ilya (pragmatic because one of them has to be) shoots the tires out from the car. When Gaby catches up to the man he shoves the briefcase into her ribs and she screams, but holds onto him, so he hits her again, then again, and that third hit finall drops her. Her fingers wrap around his ankle, tug him down with her. He fumbles, clumsy, for his gun but Ilya catches his hand. Breaks the wrist. Also the elbow. The man curls into himself, whimpering as Ilya holds him by the neck.  
Gaby yanks the camera from the man's neck and shoves it in his face. Flash. He looks away. “Not so much fun now, is it kakerlake?”  
“Is he useful to us?” Ilya holds his gun whisper-soft against the back of the man's ear.  
“He and Araldi talked a lot. He was always in the office. Or in the room. With his camera.”  
“Then we will have conversation.”

It is a good thing, to drag the man sniveling and sobbing into the building. To feel his pulse jump and shimmy. This is what he promised her. Intimate retribution. He dumps the man on the office floor as Gaby sets the briefcase on the desk. Her hand moves to her ribs.  
“Are you alright?” Ilya asks her.  
She nods. “Just breathing.”   
“I need to clear the rest of the building. Stay with him. If he causes trouble, shoot his knees out.”

The man yelps.

“Your arm--” She says.  
“Will wait. Just a scratch.”  
He doesn't want to leave her alone, here, and she reads his hesitation. Straightens her shoulders, drops her hand from her ribs. “Go. I am fine.”   
Her whole body is shaking but the hand holding the gun-- that hand is firm.

Now it is good that they are apart because he can focus only on the things he knows by heart. Muscle memory. Sweep the room. Check the bodies. Repeat. He could do it blind. He finds one last hostile-- some thug with a knife-- and the kill is impersonal. It is clean, sharp-edged. She clouds things. She makes him hate the men who shoot at her, who come at her with knives or pipes or fists, she makes him want to-- need to-- dissemble them. She makes it matter too much, like someone has taken out some essential organ he even realized he had inside him and now parades it, raw and quivering, in front of everyone. She is an exposed nerve. When he holds her in bed after the missions, it is as much for this reason as any other: to tuck this part of him back inside himself. He reaches the last room satisfied, like he's stretched cramped muscles.

It's a dark room. Clotheslines of photos. He collects them into a cardboard box so they can examine them later, and the first row is useful-- bits and pieces of promisingly sinister machinery outside other promisingly non-descript warehouses-- but farther back into the room the pictures change. All of them are of the same tiny room, but the women in the pictures are different. An old woman. A whore. A pudgy middle-aged brunette. A young waitress still in her uniform. A small girl, whose face he cannot look at because it will gut him. He cannot let himself acknowledge what is happening to them in the pictures; he must remind himself that they are already gone, disembodied, ghosts. He cannot enter the photo and stop their suffering.   
This works until the last group of pictures.  
This works until it's Gaby.

Ilya has the same feeling he did in his dream about the potato field, that he is standing witness to something that he simultaneously cannot endure and cannot stop. She is frozen in those moments, unreachable to him in her pain, in her nakedness, in her fear. He can't enter that space.  
The red mist descends.  
After it clears, he stands in the wreckage of the room, staring at the pictures for too long. Studying them. He will want to remember exactly what Araldi is doing, in these pictures. Exactly what he owes.  
The gunshot interrupts him. And the scream.  
It is not her scream-- he knows her scream-- but still he runs.

She sits in the office chair, swiveling back and forth, bleeding from her temple.  
Her gun trained on the squirming man clutching what is left of his right knee.   
“The damn filing cabinet was locked.” She said. “He said he had a key in his pocket. He headbutted me. Knocked me into the desk and tried to run. He didn't get far.” She glares at him like she's considering shooting him again. “I found the key myself.” She gestures to the stack of files on the desk.   
“What took so long?”  
“Loose ends.” Ilya says. “But the building is safe. We can talk to him now.”  
Gaby hops up from the chair and walks across the hall. Ilya follows her to a rusty metal door, which she pushes open. She stands in the doorway and considers the room: cement floor, one lightbulb, a chair bolted to the center of the floor. Shackles in the corner, by a filthy mat.

“I bled more than I thought,” she says, kicking at the edge of the mat. “I thought I was going to die in that corner,” she says. Then corrects herself. “Wait, that's wrong.”  
She points to a large ceramic bathtub also bolted to the floor. Rust and blood and a small fingernail that matches what's missing from her left hand. “There. I thought I would die there.” She folds her arms over her ribs, an unconscious protective gesture. “It was supposed to be an ice bath, you know, like for crazy people, but they kept fucking running out of ice. I kept laughing at them. Araldi got impatient and just held me down.”  
She isn't talking to him anymore. She's talking to the fucking tub, like it can hear her, like it remembers her.   
“Gaby.” he turns her face back toward him. Holds it between his hands so that she can't see the room, so that she just sees him. Steady. “Go outside. It's warm out there.”  
She nods and walks straight across the hall, over the blood and the broken man, right out into the sunlight. Sits down, halfway across the parking lot. Her crying rises like bird-wing, like a sudden, startled flight. Ilya doesn't go to her. If he steps out the door after her, she'll shut it down and she needs to let it all leave her. She needs to cry alone, for now.  
And he has work to do.

Ilya rolls up his sleeves. Grabs the camera man by the ankles, drags him across the hall like pulling a trout out of the river. Throws him, screaming, into the tub and there are fucking straps at the bottom. That's what happened to her. Over and over and over. Ilya looses it a little, the red mist rushing up. By the time it clears he's choked the bastard unconscious. Damn.  
He pulls the swivel chair across the floor, blood streaking behind. He turns on the water and waits.  
The water climbs up to the little trout's chest when he wakes and opens his mouth to scream again but Ilya pushes him under just enough, just enough to fill his mouth and nose. Stands back. Lets him sputter.  
“You are going to die in here.” He says. “You will bleed out or drown. It will take a while. Or you will get lucky.”   
He pushes the man under water again.   
Waits.  
This time, there's no screaming, just gasping. Oxygen is becoming more important than pain.  
“Araldi is ours now. You can't help him, but you can help yourself.”   
Ilya submerges him again, longer. He remembers the negatives in the dark room and it is harder than it should be to let him up. He almost wait too long.  
“Where is the exchange?”   
The trout sputters something, shakes his head.   
Ilya reaches into the bloody bathwater and cups the man's shattered kneecap.  
Not ungently.

“Did you take the pictures for yourself?”

He tightens his fingers. The man begins to squeal. High-pitched. He shakes his head again.  
“For Araldi?” Ilya asks him. The man nods. Ilya squeezes tighter. “And you just took the pictures, right?”  
The man nods his head. Vigorously.  
Ilya holds up the picture of Gaby that had been in his hand when he'd heard the gunshot, the one he couldn't leave behind. Holds it right in the man’s face. “How about her?”  
“Didn't....hurt …. her...” The man gasps.   
“You just took pictures.” Ilya nods. He leans close. “Ask yourself if that matters to me.”   
The man begins to weep. Snot and tears and sobbing.

“I will sit in that chair for three minutes. Then either you decide how you die or I do.”

Four minutes later, the gunshot echoes.  
Five minutes later, Ilya rinses his hands.  
He goes in search of gasoline, which is always somewhere in these places. There are always matches. Always things to burn. He locates both, and empties the entirety into the darkroom. Flicks the match. He adds the relevant maps and files to the cardboard box of photos and leaves the warehouse.   
Outside, she's still cross-legged on the pavement, ragged-edged and red-eyed and she's turned her face up to the sun and he just watches her, at first. Watches her soak it in.  
She doesn't ask about the smoke billowing from the building. Doesn't ask about the conversation. Doesn't know to ask about the picture folded in his pocket.  
“Where are we going?” She says.  
“Belgrade.”   
“Should we radio Solo--”  
“No time.”  
“What does that mean?”   
“Get the car.”  
“We're driving to Belgrade?”  
“To Paris. Flying to Belgrade. You drive. I will look through the files.”  
“Or we just go back to the hotel. Or to the CIA safehouse. Where there are resources--”  
“I said no time.” His hands tighten on the suitcase. He digs the keys out of his pocket and hold them out to her. “Look on the bright side. You get to drive.”

Her eyes narrow when she looks at him, like there's a question the edge of her silence, but she shakes it away and grabs the keys from him instead. They leave the warehouse and all of its rooms behind them. No time to watch it burn.

**

He looks up from the files and photographs with a dull headache and the sign flashes   
He hates Paris.  
He is unimpressed with the city of fucking light, with its open air cafes and wistful artists scrambling everywhere like paint-covered vermin. The Eiffel Tower is medicore to him. The shopping is good, yes, but he's rarely shopping for himself and while he's found a certain amount of pleasure in putting Gabby in the most lavish things Waverly can afford, it's always for The Mission. The old bookstores are the only redemption, filled with titles he can't get back home, and he has to force himself not to horde, not to swallow the books whole because he doesn't know how long this will last. The books. The dresses. Gabby. Any of it.  
Maybe that's why he hates the city.  
Because the only way he can experience it with her is in-between everyone else's plans. Agendas. Time tables. He wants to take her to Leningrad, to the Church of the Resurrection, to lay in the summer by the Neva, to buy her flowers and soda from the street vendors, to read Chekov to her naked in a half-dark room. He wants long, still afternoon hours.  
He needs to stop thinking this way.  
It is counter-productive.

He hands Gabby the card Napoleon gave him. “This address.”  
“This is not the contact we used last time.”  
“It's not UNCLE.”

She brakes. Ungently. The stack of his pictures in his lap fall to the floor.   
“This is wrong.”  
“You are correct. You brake too fast.”  
“Not what I meant, Ilya.” She glares at him in the rearview mirror. “We leave Solo with an informant to go information gathering but we don't take any of the information back to Solo. We get a lead but we don't call it in. We're flying across Europe but it's not for UNCLE. What are you not telling me?”  
He bends and picks up the pictures. Arranges them. Corner to corner.  
“Is this a KGB thing?” she asks him. “Do they want something from this mission? Are they leaning on you?” She says this with an endearing indignance, as if she would march up to the Kremlin and punch someone in the nose. “Ilya, answer me. Or I'm driving us back to Rouen.”  
He tucks the pictures back into the briefcase.  
“We don't trust Araldi.” He said. “Waverly thinks he's our best option at stopping this arms deal. Solo and I have doubts. So we're working both ends. He's there with Araldi. We are here. In Paris. Flying to Belgrade. When we have something solid, we'll bring UNCLE back in.”  
This is a good lie. It surprises him how good it is, and pains him, that it's easier than he thought to use her trust in him against her better judgment.  
Her fingers curl, uncurl, curl around the white leather steering wheel.   
“Maybe I will say I believe you,” she said. “But this is not Ilya. You're the one who always fills out his paperwork and who has memorized the contents of every protocol file we've ever been handed. You don't race around Europe burning down warehouses because you don't like the mission parameters.”  
This time she turns around, leans over the back seat. Touches his forehead, right where it aches, smoothes out the wrinkles. “If it was something else, you could tell me. I know what it's like to be entangled. You can trust me.”  
“I know.” he pulls her hand to his mouth, kisses her palm. “Now can you drive without more of the whiplash? It is bad for my back.”  
She rolls her eyes and they are on the road again.  
She wants to stop at her favorite cafe for baguettes and brie and wine, some hole-in-the-wall by the river, and he leaves her at a sidewalk table to find a quiet phone booth. He isn't sure how Solo is going to like this.  
The phone rings, rings, rings.  
“Hello?” Solo sounds tired or pissed or both.  
“The Matisse is obviously a fake.” (It was Solo's turn to choose the call signs. Obviously.)  
“But the buyer will pay full price anyway.” A sigh. “Tell me some good news. I'm on the verge of locking our guest in the closet for the rest of his visit.”  
“She took us back to the warehouse.”  
“Was it occupied?”  
“We cleared it. We had conversations.”  
“We?”  
“I had conversations. She waited outside.”  
The art of these conversations was another thing neither of them wanted Gabby to know how to do, even though eventually she would need to know. Another thing they were delaying.   
“They must not have realized Araldi was taken. All their information was on-site. An office, a dark room. We took what was important.”  
“What did you find out?”  
“The meeting is in Belgrade.”  
Solo grunts. “Yugoslavia. Think Tito is involved?”  
“Maybe. Maybe not.”  
“Be careful. He's not going to fond of a very obviously Russian agent and a very obviously German agent poking around his backyard.”  
“We will be careful.”  
“You'll be out of range of the trackers.”  
“Yes.”  
“I look to your ridiculously impeccable sense of duty to keep our terms in mind.”  
“I am hanging up now.”  
“Peril--”  
“What?”  
“The conversations....was it someone involved with her?”  
“A photographer.”  
Solo's silences are always unexpected and this one stretches whole seconds. Ilya feels obligated to do something, to say something useful.  
“I shot him in a bathtub.”  
“Is that all?”  
“There was more. Before I shot him.”   
An exhalation. “Carry on then.”   
Ilya rolls his eyes; Solo picks up Waverly's annoying English chirpiness when he's trying to be light and deft about something horrible.  
“Goodbye Cowboy.”

He hangs up and considers Solo's estimation of his impeccable sense of duty.  
Delivering Gaby to Araldi would not be the worst thing he has done. Not by half. Especially since she would agree, would go herself if she knew the stakes. Would shout at him for not telling her, would throw some useless object in the hotel room at his head in a small and righteous indignation. Giving her up will not be the bloodiest thing, or the most painful thing, or the most costly thing, but it's the first thing he might be incapable of doing. When it comes down to it, he isn't certain his body would obey, even if his brain somehow consented. He doesn't know if he'll be able to to make his muscles hold still, how to lock his bones in place.   
He doesn't have to know.  
He won't have to know.  
Damn it.  
He calls Solo's Frenchman and offers him a Monet in exchange airplane tickets and passports: the usual favors. He returns to Gaby, who is sitting at her table surrounded by sunlight, and takes her to the small, dark room where they'll wait for their contact. All this will take time. Hours lost.   
She asks him why he's pacing and he lies about a weather headache even though outside it is a beautiful day. She tells him to step away from the suitcase of photos and maps and lie down on the old blue sofa beside her, even though it won't fit them both, and she pulls him against her, like a child, and covers his face with her hands and tells him he can stop for a minute, he can stop. She is wrong. He can't. But he can't do anything else until the papers arrive, so he does let her push his eyes close, and he does let her wrap her arms around him like some kind of advance consolation.  
“Something is wrong about this mission. You are wrong.”  
“I am fine.” He realizes she won't be satisfied with this and hastily amends it. “Tired.”  
“You can sleep.”  
“Not here.”  
“If it is the KGB--”  
“Not the KGB. The weather makes my head hurt and I am tired and you are making me better. We can stop talking now.  
“I don't believe you.” She sighs and lowers her head to lean it against his shoulder. “Just...tell me before it becomes a problem, right? I can't be your partner if I don't know what we're up against.”

He could say: We're up against weights and measures, against things meted out and balanced and your pain versus someone elses and the ruthless equilibrium that all of us are fighting to maintain and we're up against the fact that you weigh more to me than any of it and that is terrifying

He could ask her to read Chekov:   
It's in the mission bag, although he doesn't remember packing it.   
When one has no real life, one lives by mirages. It's still better than nothing.  
Or he could sit and close his eyes and he'll keep count of the minutes, he will. He'll know how much time this has cost. Down to the second. He'll know...

**

She prods him in the ribs-- not sharply but not gently. Briskly. She waves their airline tickets in front of his face. “You get to be Aleksandr. You are a buyer for some machinist corportation. It's an excuse to poke around factories. I get to be the secretary. My name is Dragna. I sound like a scary grandmother” She rolls her eyes. “Someday I can be the buyer and you can be my secretary.”  
“I wouldn't look good in heels.”  
“You don't know that.” She smiles. Not sharply but not gently. “But we can discuss it on the plane. You've had your nap.”  
“You let me sleep?” He stands, awake. “We are on mission.”  
“You're no good to us dead tired, Aleksandr.”  
“I could sleep on plane.”  
“Or you could sleep here while I took my turn with the files.”  
He waits for her next words, waits to find out if she found her picture and if she's going to throw the phone at his head for taking it but that picture is still in his pocket. Out of harm's way. He doesn't know what he's going to say when he shows it to her. He blinks the thought away and focuses on what she's saying.  
“Every two weeks for the past six weeks, there's been serious money going into Yugoslavia. Some of it looks like the normal bribery of local officials and other pocket-padding but some of it goes to this guy Emil Borislav. His family owns a chain of pickle warehouses. I think we should visit him first.” She taps the paper. “It has his address.”  
“When does our flight leave?”  
“One hour.” She tosses him half a wrapped sandwich. “Eat. I've already packed what matters. We'll call Waverly about the rest.”  
“No need.” Ilya says, “One hour. Let's go.”  
He's trying to remember the last time he flew to Yugoslavia, how much time it will cost them. Four hours? Six hours? Eight?  
“You never leave evidence unaccounted for.”  
“One hour. Grab the bag.”  
“Ilya.” She grabs his wrist. Her eyes the same dark as when the bullet grazed him earlier. She is worried. She bites her lower lip. He almost tells her everything, then, but instead he steers them both out the door, into the night. She says nothing but she moves her arm away from him, folds it into herself. She follows him with curt, efficient steps. While they drive to the airport, she drills him on the details of their cover story. Her eyes never leave the road. She makes him eat the sandwich before they get out of the car, makes him promise at least to call Solo to tell him they're leaving a car full of possibly-probably-likely important information parked in some back lot of the airport. She hunches over the paper cup of airport coffee, and the flourescent lights bring out all the bruises and the cuts and the shadows. She's got a story for that. Reckless boyfriend. Motorbike accident. He can't even brush her hair out of her face because she's a proper secretary; she won't even take a cup of coffee from his hand, insists she gets it herself and she's still limping and the old woman with the small dog two seats from them glares at him like she knows it's his fault. 

It's going to be a long plane ride. 

 

**

Ilya sits on the couch, his hands in fists, his fists in front of him, and blood everywhere.  
On his knuckles, on the couch, on his shirt and the cuff of his pants and on the floor spreading over an olive green rug. Gaby screaming at him from across the room what did you do what did you do he was just an old man damn it you Russian bastard what did you do to him what the fuck were you thinking

Ilya tries to remember.

The plane landed, but was delayed on the tarmac. For two hours they sat and sweated in seats that were too small for him and the whole while he could feel the time sliding out. Like blood out of a cut. He had to wait, pinned in place, while arrogant men in crumpled uniforms asked questions for the pure pettiness of it. He couldn't tell Gaby why he kept fidgeting. Why he let an insult slip at just the wrong moment and cost them another hour in some cigarette-foul back room until Gaby could charm the fat little customs official into letting them go.  
He remembers all this clearly.  
They found the address of the man who owned the pickle warehouses. He told Gaby to wait in the car. She objected, annoyed at his slip at the airport. But he had thought she listened to him. An old man, in shirt-sleeves, met him at the door with a cigarette and Ilya thought he asked the question but maybe he just broke his nose. The conversation was a blur. He kept demanding information and the old man kept breaking and bleeding and knew nothing and Ilya knew this but he couldn't stop because if there wasn't a different answer he was going to have to call Solo and tell him nothing. And they'd take Gaby back.   
So he kept hitting and waiting for the man to say something.  
He remembers this less clearly.  
Only she hadn't waited in the car. Not long enough at any rate. She'd launched herself at him like a small hurricane and beaten him back from the old man's unconscious body. Bent over the broken body and breathed into it like it was someone who mattered to her, pounded the crushed chest like she could make the heart beat, and then when she could not, rocked back onto her heels and now she is cursing him with everything in her.  
And he sits on the couch, staring at the blood on his hands  
Which is very clear.  
“We don't have time,” he says.  
“To what, Ilya? To not kill our only lead in the first five minutes?” She has blood on her knees. She doesn't wipe it off. It looks like she's a girl who's skinned her legs on a bike. He should take her home, to her family, should make sure she gets there safe and he almost remembers why this is impossible. “You have got to talk to me.” Her voice thin, shaking, controlled. “You have got to tell me what is going on.”  
“We had twenty-four hours.” He said. “We have four left. It's not enough.”  
“No,” she says, “We hav time before the exchange.”  
“Something else is going to happen first.”  
She shakes her head and it is not pity, it is disgust, and she's right to be that way. “You make no sense. I'm going to call Solo.”  
“No!” It bursts out of his chest, a growl, and he grabs her wrist, harder than he means too, in a panic. She slaps him and she means it, no warning blows, she draws blood from his upper lip, but he doesn't let go and it could have gone somewhere even worse between them when a set of big black boots kick through the door. Light fills the room and sparkles in all the blood. A man curses in Croatian, and-- when his eyes land on Ilya-- in Russian, for good measure. Ilya knows the uniform-- secret police. Chert. Damn it. Other sets of boots swarm in this man, like he's a rock in a river, something impassable, something Ilya knows they are not going to be able to paddle around. He lets go of Gabby's wrist and spits his blood onto the floor and gets ready to systematically disassemble men and cause at least one international incident.  
But she wraps her arms around him, and it's not violent, it's not even insistent. It's featherlight, and she's getting blood all over her turtleneck but she doesn't complain. Es lohnt sich nicht, she whispers, in her own language. It's not worth it. And then, because the men with boots are pulling them apart and his muscles tense, spring-coiled, she appeals to him in his own tongue: Ostavaysya so mnoy. Stay with me.   
She lifts her hands above her heads and kneels. A ring of men with guns are shouting at him. Klekni. Klekni. On your knees. He doesn't remember obeying. He blanks before he hits the floor. He doesn't touch a one of them, not even when they slam their boots into his ribs and into the of his back and into his groin and into his face, until Gabby wriggles her tiny and defiant body between them and hollers, in a mix of German and Russian, that if they fucking kick him one more time, the KGB is personally going to use their balls to sharpen their knives after she tears them off with her fucking teeth. The Immovable Man in the center of the room grunts at this and all the pain disappears, not that he felt it. He isn't there. He's not even with Gabby. He's with Chekov.

A country house on a terrace. In front of it, a garden.

Ostavaysya so mnoy. Stay with me. 

“You are KGB,” the Immovable Man says, in Russian.

“Nyet.” She says. “But he is. You can run it. Call Moscow. Ask about Ilya Fucking Kuryakin then go get a fresh change of underwear. Or we can help each other. If you got here this fast, you were listening in. Probably from a van that smells of cabbage.”  
Immovable Man stares at her, rock-blank.

“We'll come with you,” Gaby says, “because we have questions for you. We'll answer whatever questions we can. Stick us in whatever room you want while you figure it out but don't you fucking touch us. I'm not KGB but my friends have knives to sharpen too.”  
Ilya is a bit dazed, by now, at how much she reminds him of a pit bull.  
He half excepts her to lunge at Immovable Man's throat but she stays beside him, no, in front of him, and she will. Not. Budge.   
“Help them up,” the man says.  
“We'll walk.” She gets up. Smoothes her hair. Glares at Ilya to get his ass off the ground. He will follow her, because right now he'll follow her anywhere, follow that incandescent glow that's rising up from her skin and fucking hell he has to get control of his head.  
Es lohnt sich nicht A country house on a terrace. Ostavaysya so mnoy. In front of it, a garden.  
Stay with me.  
Until the end, he will tell her. He can only leave her by cataclysm: fire, wind, water, moving earth. He can only leave when the entire world wrenches out from under his feet, which by his watch is four hours from now.

**

She's right-- the van smells like cabbage. The tiny cinderblock cell they walk into-- walk, because that was the deal, but it's still unfriendly-- somehow also smells like cabbage, and also bleach. It's the bleach the worries him. That means things were done here that had to be erased after. And they were sloppy; there are brown flecks of old blood in the crease between the cement floor and the wall. She doesn't see this, and he won't tell her. She paces. He crouches on the balls of his feet, in the center of the room, back to the wall, and he balances his fits carefully one on each knee. She stops pacing, takes one look from his head to his toes, and bangs on the door. A smoking man in uniform eventually answers. “Get me a towel,” she says. “There's blood everywhere.”  
He shrugs. “Whose fault is that?”  
“Do you want to clean it up later?” 

He grunts. She gets her towel.

She squats before him and leans on her toes, like a ballerina, both of them holding all their weight on the tiniest points. Both of them balancing. She wipes the blood from his face, the splatter that isn't his, the split lip that is her handiwork, the speckles on his neck, on his clothes, on his arms and hands. She is thorough, and silent. When she is done, she folds the towel in a square.

“Why is there only four hours?” She says. “What else is happening first?”  
“The bomb we are looking for is not ordinary bomb.” he said.  
“I know.”  
“We have no time and no good options. Araldi has the good cards.”  
“I know.”  
“He has conditions.”  
The muscles in her jaw tighten “Go on.”  
“You are the condition.”   
She leans back, onto her heels, away from him. A half-smile. “I pissed him off, didn't I?”  
“Yes. And that's why we both know this isn't going to be about sex. It will be about something else. You know what else.”  
She wraps her arms around her broken ribs. “I know what else.”

“Solo gave me twenty-four hours to find something. I think we have found something. You were right. That old man was good lead. I think the factory is not making pickles. But we don't have time to find out. And it's my fault.”  
“Why didn't you tell me?”  
“I thought we could fix it first.” He clenches and unclenches his fist.   
“It's not your decision,” she says. “It's my decision. It has always been my decision. You should have let me make it.”  
“You would do your job.”  
“Yes. I would do my job. I know Waverly. He's told me what to do in these....situations. Play along. Make nice. Call for backup if you need to.”  
“It won't be like that. This isn't some fat accountant who likes a bit of fucking along with his red wine and rare steak. Araldi is different. He devours things.”   
“I will do my job.” A fainter whisper, this time. “I'm going to call Solo.”  
“Wait.” He kneels, toward her, not touching her, but close enough. He pulls at the waistband of his pants, tugs it down past his hip to show her the brand that after these years is white but still angry, still visible. P.K. “Look at it.” he says. “Touch it if you want. Understand it.”  
She does touch it, featherlight, fingers a whisper, and he has to control his flinch even though the skin does not feel it. “Did the KGB give you that?”  
“A commander. But before I was in KGB. When I was still a boy. Thirteen. He visited my mother. After a while, he decided he wanted to visit me too. This let the other KGB officers know that I was preferred. He liked my mother to watch when he preferred me. Liked her to know there was nothing she could do. He took special interest in my military training. He taught me to do anything and kill anything....except him. He was untouchable.”  
“Ilya--” She leans forward, so her forehead is against his. Gently tugs up the waistband of his pants and covers the spot on his hip with her cupped palm. “  
“Some men are not men. Some men just are teeth.”  
She closes her eyes, shakes her head. “There were not-men in my family, remember? They killed people too. Devoured them, like you say. My uncle--”  
“You don't owe the world for what he did. Or your father. Or any of them.”   
“Maybe I do.” She says. “Maybe if I suffer enough, it will be over--”  
“You can never suffer enough for it to be over.” He says. “I have tried.”  
“People are going to die.”  
“People are always going to die.”  
“Damn it, Ilya. Stop.”  
“I told myself, when I was being preferred, that I would not be my mother. I would not watch someone I love--”  
“Love?” She is bewildered. He can't unthread the word; it's spinning out between them now. But maybe he can wind it back, just a bit.   
“Among other words.” He says, pulling back from her to the wall. This time it is her hand that catches him around the wrist. A strong circle of her fingers.  
The door opens. Immovable Man appears. “M16 girl,” he says. “We talk now. The Red Peril stays there. And behaves. Maybe we talk to him too. Or maybe we hang him from the ceiling until KGB comes to collect him. Understand?”  
“Understood.”   
She turns back to Ilya. “Love is a good word.” She says, And don't worry,” she leans even closer, kisses him on the lip she herself split, three quick, fast kisses, benedictory kisses. “You won't have to watch.”  
She walks away from him, towards the the Immovable Man, towards the wedge of brighter light coming through the half-open door. He filters two dozen logistics through his head. Nothing works. They are out of time. People they don't know are waiting for them to save their lives. The men with teeth are hungry. The entire bent corkscrew of the world spirals to her walking out of the door, and it always has, ever since Araldi walked into their hotel room. The past twenty four hours wasn't going to work. It was always an exercise in consolation, and Solo knew it, and Ilya himself knew it. Now she knows this, knows all of it, as clearly as Ilya does himself.

She doesn't look back.

 

** 

When she is gone, it is somehow easier.  
Not gone from the room-- that part is unbearable, when she is just on the other side of the door but receding, like tide, like foam on the sea-- but later, when the nice men in suits collect her for the flight back to France. When there is truly nothing he can do. Then it gets easier. Helplessness is its own mercy, and its own clarity. For the first time since they got off the plane in Yugoslavia, he is no longer running out of time. Time has run out. He is suspended in only the now. He can think, instead of twitch and shudder and flail and grasp. He can draw a breath. 

The old man. The seller of pickles. The warehouses.

He calls for Immovable Man and slides into the Red Peril persona, cold and arrogant and not afraid to remind them who the bigger dog between their two countries.   
He lays it out plainly: they can give him the men he needs to investigate the warehouses, and when they turn up the bioweapons they'll all get medals-- probably from two countries. He is exaggerating, at this point, but he wants them wet and feverish with pride and with glory. There might be substantial displays of gratitude. At this point he sounds like Solo, shamelessly selling an idea to people just unhappy enough with their current life to buy it. Immovable Man is capable. His boots are glossy mirror-finished, his uniform crisp enough to cut your finger if you run it down a crease. He aspires to more than cabbage-stinking surveillance vans and local squabbles. This mission is important. The M16 girl had to be gotten out of the way. The British were always too curious for their own good. But this was Mother Russia's business. Mother took good care of her friends.  
If they declined, he'd go alone. If they tried to stop him, he'd kill a regrettable number of them and go alone anyway. Mother Russia would be angry.  
She had a long memory, and it could be a gift or a curse. Up to them.  
The Immovable Man drums his fingers on the desk.  
Then he smiles. Comrade.  
Ilya gets an entire patrol, and the return of his gun. It will take them time to fly her to Paris. More time more to drive her to the hotel. He can fight a small war by that time, and he will.

**

What happens next happens in flashes, between bullets, between explosions, between discoveries. The room beneath the warehouse, with the laboratory and the rows and rows of hospital gurneys with straps. The smell of fresh bleach from a hasty cleanup. The incinerator left running. Burnt bone and singed hair and the after-stench of flesh. The reel of video footage, and the picture. Testing, testing. Vomit on the floor, after three of the local boys can't take it anymore. But Ilya watches. Takes notes. The virus is liquid borne. Not aerosol. It will have to be deposited into a water source. It will spread quickly and kill lavishly. But it requires generous dosing. They'll have to transport it in something large and inconspicuous

A train track snakes out from the warehouse into the night.  
There are always trains, the local boys say, they move the brine for the pickles in great vats.  
Ilya can only just keep himself from running down the track on foot. He is so close. He tells them to close every meter of track. Every centimeter of road, every fucking goat path and cow trail. Nothing on wheels moves until they say. If he could just reach his hand out far enough down the rail line, if he could just close it on the burning metal of the engine, he could wrestle it down himself.  
If he could just reach.

 

**

Four hours, thirty four minutes, fifty- nine seconds later, Ilya sits in what he thinks is a grocer's shop and clutches a heavy black phone. He grocer woman looks at him in sheer terror, as if he is something come to hunt them. Something from folk lore. And maybe he is: he staggered out of the woods into her shop and promised her all the money she could imagine for the use of her phone. Which he now struggles to hold it; three of his fingers are broken. His other hand burned, missing fingernails. Blood soaking his shirt, most of it not his but enough of it his that standing up is a struggle. He thinks the engineer with the knife got his ribs. Sometime before the train derailment. Or during the fire that followed. All of that is blurry. The world blinks black and white around him; his brain fires and fires and he clutches the phone. Tries to remember the number for their hotel. Sways. His legs buckle and he falls to his knees, still clutching the phone.   
The room swims.  
The number in his head swims. A hotel room. Something is ringing, a bell, like on a bike, ringing, ringing, it won't let him think, but then Solo's voice--  
“Illya? Illya?”   
“I have it” he says, not really into the phone.  
“Illya? What?”  
He holds it to his mouth. “I have bomb. I have it. Go get her.”  
“Waverly will want proof--”  
“I will bring the proof. Go.”  
The phone clicks dead and he lets the receiver dangle, staring into the silent mouthpiece and wondering if he pushes it to his lips could she feel it? It's his last thought when his brain blinks black.

The grocer woman is kind through her fear: she wakes him. Pushes a paper cup of black coffee into his hand. Says that his friends have come for him. Immovable Man's shiny shoes wait for him in the doorway. A car that smells of cabbage can take him to a hospital, which he will not stay at He collects the necessary files from the Immovable Man’s office and boards a plane before the hasty bandages are even done seeping blood. He doesn't wash the smoke from his skin. 

**

The hotel room is naked and empty-- the cleaner team has removed all the furniture for processing on the usual pretense of bedbugs. Every fiber and fleck of their presence, every blood stain and hair, every wire and shell casing, every residue gone. Right down to the mattresses.   
It is unusual for Ilya to be in one of their hotel rooms after cleaning. Normally the team is already elsewhere by this time, but here he is, and here Solo is, standing a rectangle of light on the bare floor. Ilya insisted on coming back here for the debrief. It has to be here.

“I heard you derailed a train.” Solo says.   
“A small train.” Ilya shrugs. “I had some local help. For part of it.”   
Solo smirks “Keep that efficiency up; I could use a vacation.”  
“Where is she?”  
“Paris, I think. Waverly thought she should have some down time.”  
“Araldi?”  
“Set to be transferred from to sunny Miami later this afternoon.”  
“Svin’ya.”  
“I agree.”  
“Are you going to tell me what happened? After she got back?”  
“No.” Solo says.  
“Cowboy--”  
“She wasn’t in there long. You interrupted.”  
“And you wouldn’t have.”  
“Not if she was still doing her job.”  
Ilya’s fist clenches, which of course Solo notices.  
“You don’t want to hit me,” he says.   
“Where is he? The safehouse?”  
“Waverly made a deal. You know how the English are about those sorts of things.”  
“I made a promise. You stay here and smoke.”  
“Not a damn chance.” Solo flicks the cigarette butt into the corner, like a dead cockroach. I owe him something too.”

It’s not him that I owe, Ilya thinks.  
He held her in the dark. He’d made promises.   
Solo understands this, and in the end, after the violent and righteous work they do together in the conversation room of the safehouse, it’s Ilya alone with these promises and Araldi.   
Promises he keeps. 

 

(after)

When he finds her in the little room in Paris, after it’s done, there are things neither of them can say. He doesn’t ask her what happened after she left him in Belgrade. She doesn’t ask him how Araldi died.  
He brings baguettes, champagne, and a stack of his Chekov favorites. He shuts the door and locks it behind them, and he throws the phone out the window. They lie on the unmade bed, her head resting in the crook of his arm, her eyes closed, and he reads to her. For days. They go through all the baguettes, and the champagne, and they venture out at night for more wine, for cheese, for blackberry jam. He reads her Uncle Vanya and The Cherry Orchard and Ward No. 6. Unflinching, uncomforting things. Words that offer a kind of grief, a lament neither of them are allowed to voice.  
And finally, after days, after the last black and bitter word of it, he closes the books.  
And the room is silent.  
She stretches, like a cat. The mid-morning sun through the lace curtains dapples the bed, like fish-scales under a current, tiny flecks of warm gold on her mouth, on her face and the side of her neck. When she kisses him, he imagines she leaves tiny smears of light on his mouth, on his jaw.   
When she kisses him, the weights and measures of the world bend before them.  
When she kisses him, they have all the time.


End file.
